Research:
All living things such as humans and plants must have
water to survive. Water gets recycled in a process called
the water cycle. Evaporation is the change of liquid-water
to water vapor. Evaporation of water occurs everyday
whether it is in a cup or outside in a lake. Evaporation
is a major part of the water cycle.

Dry Foods
A major section of food industry today is production of
dry-foods. It is a great way to preserve food when not in
need. All sorts of foods are dried including meats,
vegetables, fruits and instant coffee products. Drying
food is the process of evaporating all the interior water
of a food product and in most cases this will be done in a
hot air tunnel. Many seasonal products will be dried to
reduce the cost of storage and distribution of the
products during the year. Drying Foods is less costly to
store over a long period of time. Some liquid foods such
as orange juice are usually partially dried to lose 80% of
their water and the result is called concentrate.

Hypothesis:
Since there is a lot of liquid juice in an orange, our
hypothesis states that there will be 50% or more water in
an orange.

Weigh the paper and
aluminum foil which is being used to dry the orange
in.

Cut the orange in very
thin slices to speed up the drying process.

Spread the slices over
the paper, which is placed on the aluminum foil.

Keep it in a warm place
until it is fully dry. You can expect it to take 4-36
hours depending on the heat and airflow. We used a
desk light with a 150 watt lamp and a fan as a drier.
We mounted our desk light to be about a foot above the
sliced oranges and place the fan about 10 feet away
from the orange slices facing the oranges to create
airflow. In this way we completed the drying process
in 10 hours.

Weigh the orange slices
once fully dried. Don't forget to deduct the weight of
the paper and the aluminum foil if you are weighing
the orange slices with the paper and aluminum foil.

Weight the orange, paper and aluminum foil
separately and together and record the
results.

Use a precise scale for more accuracy.

Cut the orange in tin slices and spread
them over the paper and aluminum foil.

Keep the slices in a warm place with
enough air flow.

Weight the sample a few times to trace the
progress of drying.

Weight the final dry orange slices to
calculate the weight loss caused by
drying.

Record
And Analyze Data:

After the orange slices
where completely dry, we put them back on the weighing
scale and weighed it with the paper and aluminum foil. We
then subtracted 15 grams from that total since the foil
and paper weighed 15 grams. Just like we stated before,
the orange weighed 309 grams before the experiment was
started and now weigh 58 grams. To figure out the
percentage of solids in the orange, we divide the weight
of dry sample to the weight of original sample that is :
(58/309=0.1877). To figure out the percentage of water in
the orange, we used this formula: (309-58)/309=0.8122
In result of our experiment, we found out that orange is
consisted of 81% water.